Restaurant bans tipping

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Should all restaurants rather pay their staff higher wages?

According to this article on HuffPo. a New York restaurant Sushi Yasuda has banned customers from tipping staff.

Many customers visit Sushi Yasuda, one of the most acclaimed Japanese restaurants in New York City, for its omakase menus of fresh fish and perfectly-seasoned rice tailored to personal preferences. It would be normal, at the end of a three-hour meal there, for a customer to want to show appreciation by leaving a healthy tip. But they're no longer allowed to do so. The restaurant just became one of the few in America that doesn't accept tips.

Sushi Yasuda owner Scott Rosenberg told Bloomberg restaurant critic Ryan Sutton that he has decided to stop accepting gratuities. A note on the bottom of each receipt, where you'd normally expect to see a spot to include a tip, explains:

"Following the custom in Japan, Sushi Yasuda’s service staff are fully compensated by their salary. Therefore gratuities are not accepted. Thank you.”

Sushi Yasuda is making up for lost tips to servers with a higher hourly wage that will be subsidized by higher baseline menu prices. The workers no longer have to worry about making boatloads of tips on busy Friday nights and pennies on sleepy Tuesdays, and there's no longer tension between tipped and non-tipped employees. Rosenberg told Sutton that the average customer would likely now pay slightly less than before tipping was eliminated.

In this instance the practice seems to be more about enhancing the customer experience as a whole, but, do you think this concept would work on a grander scale? Or would it just lead to sloppy service from waitrons?

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